Chasing Ghosts: Sun Araw's "Ancient Romans"

I'm a recent Sun Araw convert, having seen them this year at SXSW at the Longbranch with a colorwheel line-up consisting of A Place to Bury Strangers, the mighty Parts and Labor, keyboard head-wobblers Moon Duo, and Brooklyn's spaced out India voyeurs Prince Rama (among others). Good show all the way around, with Sun Araw and Prince Rama being the stand-outs for me. Despite their technical issues with the elaborate, mass-of-wires-and-gadgets stage set-up, Sun Araw managed to compel with their restrained, hypnotic brand of organically-looped tribalism electronic-a, and I immediately picked up segments of their back catalogue, notably 2010's amazing On Patrol and Off Duty, as well as 2008-9's Boat Trip, Beach Head, and Heavy Deeds.

Though Sun Araw's material can be hit or miss at times, it's always interesting, ranging from shimmering, psychedelic washes of electrified meditational sway, to space-dub aboriginal boogies, to tense, pregnant runways of raw sound perforated by cloudbursts of samples, all looping back into one another like some creative even horizon stretching the present moment into a multi-hued oblivion. There's the comparisons to Spacemen 3's experiments in delayed and determined melody, Popol Vuh's orchestrated master compositions for the cosmic third-eye and other new age sci-fi miasma, Music For Films-era Eno, just to name a few of the sounds one can hear bubbling to the surface of this strange brew.  I think I remarked to a friend after I had first seen them that they sounded like Spacemen and Burning Spear sitting on some Caribbean beach in the grips of an ayahuasca trip making music for 80's video game consoles (or something like that).  My initial reaction still stands.

Newest disc Ancient Romans in the main sticks to Sun Araw's (now) tried-and-true formula of lengthy slow-burn freak-outs coalescing around interwoven loops, cascading instrumentation, and funhouse vocals, with predictably trance-inducing results.  For my money, the output here pales a little in comparison to the brilliant psych-deconstruction present in On Patrol, with Ancient Romans lacking some of that album's phantasmal melodic undercurrent and the prolonged artistic restraint required to allow listeners to discover the gold at the end of the rainbow themselves, rather than the band beating it into your skull.  On Ancient Romans, one of the most readily apparent things about the album is the embrace of a more unified (straightforward?) structure and theme on each individual track, with some (such as "Fit For Ceasar" and "Lute and Lyre") coming (somewhat) close to materializing actual song structure, and album closer "Impluvium" standing two paces shy of being considered a Dionysiun dancefloor single for some future generation of the electric daisy be-here-now crowd. 

What I get the sense of overall with Ancient Romans, through imagery, feel, track titles, etc, is a kind of aural funneling of the idea of the ancient Mediterranean world down into the confines of Sun Araw's sound collages herein; thus you (I) hear the smack of the oars on wooden hull in "Crown Shell", the bustle of the sunbaked marketplace in "Crete", a moonlit walk through the darkened hills outside of Athens in "Lute and Lyre", or the pervasive majesty of the oracle in "At Delphi".  Perhaps this is just my imagination (and a little bit of the history geek in me surfacing), but it works for me when I listen to this album: the idea of a concept record by a band that seems to eschew any notion of concept anything outside of the acid-soaked tribal minimalism common to much of their other output.  If this newest record is an indication of future trends, perhaps we'll see Sun Araw begin to develop a more focused approach in their sonic meanderings, though like anyone else who's spent a good deal of time breaking open their heads, I know that meandering can be just as beneficial as a straight line.  Depends on if you have anywhere relatively important to be, I guess. 

Ancient Romans shouldn't disappoint Sun Araw zealots (of which I count myself), though new listeners would be better served starting off with some of their more dynamic output in Off Duty or On Patrol.  Still, what Ancient Romans has to offer is a picture window into some psychedelic revisionist history where the Caesar wears tie-dye and the wine never stops flowing.  Good shit, man.